Contact 2012: Contemplating a Quiet Earth

On Saturday morning, in the spirit of attending an event at which I knew not a soul and where the vocabulary would likely confound me, I packed an overnight bag and made the easy trip South down 280 in the rain to Sunnyvale for the annual CONTACT conference. If the word makes you think of the Carl Sagan book/Jodie Foster film in which a dreamer named Ellie turns a few giant dishes toward the sky, seeking signals from outer space, you’re right on track. Contact, the brainchild of anthropologist Jim Funaro, bills itself as “an interdisciplinary forum of scientists, writers and artists exploring the possibility for human futures.”

I arrived in time for the first presentation, Seth Shostak‘s “Broadcasting Into Space: Recipe for Catastrophe?” Shostak, the Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, answered Stephen Hawking’s widely publicized opinion that attempting to make contact with alien intelligence is tantamount to suicide. Shostak disagrees. “What we know about alien intention is not much,” Shostak pointed out, as the slide on the screen behind him displayed a giant zero. Meaning, of course, that what we know about alien intention is nothing at all.

Hawking has famously said that any more advanced civilization that came to earth would likely do so with the explicit aim of exploiting our resources. But beyond the fact that we can’t say with any glimmer of certitude whether a visiting civilization would be made up of gentle poets or angry warriors, Shostak contends that alien intention is a moot point. We’ve already announced ourselves rather loudly to the universe.

If we want to stop broadcasting, Shostak says, simply not actively reaching out into space in search of our neighbors is insufficient. It would, instead, be a matter of making the globe go completely quiet: no GPS, no radar, no radio or television. New York City, in fact, would have to turn off the lights. That train already left the station. Interestingly, Frank Drake, who conducted the first modern SETI experiment in 1960, noted in the evening’s keynote address that Earth’s signals are gradually growing fainter; as we become more technologically advanced, we get harder and harder to find.

I’ve been fascinated for as long as I can remember by the idea of intelligent life in the cosmos. Maybe it began in Sunday School with the radical fundamentalists in Alabama. Soon after being exposed for the first time to Antoine de St. Exupery’s The Little Prince, I asked my teacher a question which was perfectly reasonable within the context I’d been given: “Is there a Jesus on every planet?” I imagined an infinitely repeating Jesus dying on infinitely repeating crosses, among the pesky sheep and gnarly boabab trees; I couldn’t fathom a Heavenly Father who would doom every civilization but ours to hell. My question was quickly dismissed. Jesus need not multiply like the loaves and fishes, I was told, because only one planet had people on it. I had a hard time wrapping my head around that.

Call it a numbers game. We’re the pale blue dot, and there is much beyond us. Many billions of stars, many billions of planets. It isn’t unreasonable to think that somewhere, in that cosmic soup, the conditions for the formation of life exist and have been exploited, just as they have been exploited over time on our own tiny planet. To believe that Earth alone–among the countless planets that exist within their own stars’ habitable zones–provides fertile conditions for evolution seems an outlandish brand of hubris.

Following Shostak’s talk, Penny Boston, professor of Cave and Karst Studies at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, highlighted the wealth of thriving microbial life far beneath the surface of our own planet as another way of looking at astrobiology. If our own planet is a hotbed of “hidden biodiversity,” in which microorganisms continue to exist in the harshest environments we can imagine, rising from the dead when the geological conditions that kept them buried for tens of thousands of years suddenly change–then doesn’t it stand to reason that other planets may also contain hidden biodiversity?

Having been raised in the Bible Belt, where grown-ups often told me that a man in the sky created the world in seven days, the foundations of my childhood predispose me, perhaps, to taking wild leaps of faith. The naysayers claim that if there were intelligent life in the universe, we would know it by now. The aliens would have invaded, the reasoning goes, or at the very least asked us to tea. But the more I think about it, the more it seems to me that the true leap of faith would be to accept wholeheartedly the notion that we are alone. The more easily believable scenario by far is simply that we are like those uncontacted tribes in the Amazon who mistakenly believe themselves to be the center of the universe, a pocket of civilization in the midst of a greater void.

Further reading: One of the more fascinating features of the conference is the Cultures of the Imagination Simulation, C.O.T.I.

One team constructs a solar system, a world and its ecology, an alien life form and its culture, basing each step on the previous one and utilizing the principles of science as a guide to imagination. The other team designs a future human colony, planetary or space faring, “creating and evolving” its culture as an exercise in cultural structure, dynamics and adaptation. Through a structured system of progressive revelation, the teams then simulate — and experience — contact between the two cultures in real time, exploring the problems and possibilities involved in inter-cultural encounters.

Read all about C.O.T.I. dating back to 1983 and view previous simulations here.